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You may not know who Christian Allen is but you’ve probably played one of his games. The developer’s resume is dotted with impressive projects and milestones. Ever play a Ghost Recon title? He’s worked on most of them, starting off with Ghost Recon: Island Thunder and climbing the ranks to become creative director of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. From there, he took on one of the biggest projects in gaming as lead designer onHalo: Reach before joing Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for a few years.

But now, the veteran developer is in unfamiliar territory. He started a small studio of about 10 full-time members and six contractors (some of them from SOCOM-maker Zipper Interactive) and he’s gone the indie route. His team known as Serellan is working on a shoooter called Takedown: Red Sabre.

Can lightning strike twice? Capcom had a huge hit when it brought back its Street Fighter series and now the Japanese company is bringing back another fighting game from its arcade portfolio. Darkstalkers, arguably its second most popular franchise in the genre, is returning to consoles in early 2013. But it isn’t getting the Street Fighter IV treatment … yet. Capcom is bringing back the monster-filled series as a downloadable game called Darkstalkers Resurrection.

Available on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, the game will feature Night Warriors: Darkstalkers Revenge and Darkstalkers 3. From the screenshots and a news release, it looks to be a port with boosted HD graphics, filters and standard fighting game modes such as a Challenge/Tutorial mode. In addition, this version will include GGPO-enabled online play and replays that can be uploaded to YouTube.

It’s a good way for those who may have seen Morrigan Aensland and company in other games to see what the series is all about. The game will cost $14.99 or 1200 Microsoft Points.

To say that the Call of Juarez: The Cartel was a disappointment would be an understatement. The developer, Techland, wanted to take the series in a new, modern direction. Instead, they may as well have driven the series off a cliff and set the crashed remains on fire.

But everyone deserves a second chance, especially the team that also made the fantasticDead Island. They have another try at the series and went back to its roots in the Wild West. I had a chance to check out Call of Juarez: Gunslinger at Ubisoft’s Digital Day recently. The first-person shooter is scheduled to be a digital-only release on the Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and the PC.

Much has been said about Phil Fish, the lead designer of Fez. He caused a small uproar at the Game Developers Conference in March with his contention that Japanese games are terrible (to put it mildly). There’s nothing wrong with opinionated developers, but if one is going to make a statement like that in front of someone who happens to be a Japanese developer, it’s best to be polite and phrase it better.

The comment irked some fans so much that they decided to boycott Fish’s game. And that’s a shame. It speaks for a need to separate artists from their creations. The visionaries who come up with masterpieces aren’t saints. They have their flaws and human weaknesses. Celebrated writer Yukio Mishima killed himself via seppuku after a failed coup attempt in Japan in 1970. Filmmaker Elia Kazan named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. But those acts and political stances shouldn’t detract from the masterpieces they made. In the long run, it’s the work that speaks for itself rather than the artist. And the same should be said for Fish and Fez.

Visually gorgeous games don’t always have to be photorealistic. Although there’s always going to be a push toward that realism, other parts of the industry have wisely veered away from that. Some developers eschew the higher polygon count and complex physics that make some games look so scary good they leap over the Uncanny Valley.

Burnout Crash! isn’t a driving game. It may have cars. It may have roads. But at its core, Criterion’s first DLC project is a pinball game in the guise of unmitigated vehicular destruction. It’s also a title that’s been a long time coming.

It originally began on the Wii and the driving force behind the idea was that players could draw their own tracks, but Criterion said it wasn’t as fun as they expected. The studio discovered that the real fun came from the impact in intersections. They went from a game that was all about user-generated content and turned it into one that was more level-based and inspired by old-school pinball.

The Shadow of the Colossus vibe comes from the art style and the scale of some of the enormous bosses. The Prince of Persia touch comes in the silky smooth animation and platforming. Moving the main character is effortless. But the biggest giveaway is the obvious lifting of Ikaruga’s polarity gameplay. I mention this to the developers and Ubisoft folks, and they nod and grin.

It’s an idea that’s so distinct that you can tell where it came from instantly. It’s like trying to add turtle-shell throwing to a video game. You’re obviously going to get called on it, but really, it’s not a bad thing. In fact, Housemarque is brilliant for bringing the idea from shooters and adapting it to a Metroidvania-ish world.

It’s been a long road for Space Ark and Dan Marchant, Strawdog Studios’ the business development director. Two year ago, the team had come up with the idea for the game and pitched it to Microsoft. Although it was unconventional, the studio got approval for it and began work while searching for a publisher. They found one in Pinnacle Entertainment. Everything went swimmingly until the Great Recession hit more than a year ago and the publisher, like a lot of companies, had gone bust.

Marchant said, “We found ourselves with a game already in development,” and after being unable to find a new partner, Strawdog decided not to let their effort go to waste. They decided to finish Space Ark and publish it themselves via Xbox Live Arcade.

And that brings him to my house, showing me a game that looks like it could come out of a feverish dream from Keita Takahashi. Marchant explained: It’s inspired by Japanese arcade games of the past. I could see some Araknoid with a little Bubble Bobble thrown in. The colors are bright. There’s plenty or rainbows flying across the screen. It looks like a first-grader went wild with crayons.

Axel and Pixel arrives like a shock to the system. It has nothing to do with with explosions or bullet-riddled bodies. It’s no Army of Two: The 40th Day. The fact is this is game comes as a drastic departure from the blockbuster fare this time of year.

Silver Wish Games’ point and click adventure is more subdued compared with the louder, more holiday raucous titles. There’s not much blood and gore if you don’t count fire ants eating annoying beetles. Most of the violence is of the cartoonish variety as Axel and his dog, Pixel, chase after a rat through an outlandish dreamscape.

The story lends itself to the art-style, which is one of Axel & Pixel’s strenghts. It looks unlike any game you’ve seen. It’s almost like one of those cartoons on Nick Jr., a mixture of drawing and real-life pictures that somehow meld together in one cohesive whole.

As a point and click adventure, players will run through 24 levels that are divided into the four seasons. They’ll have to figure out how to travel from one end to the other with their dog by connecting a bridge or fiddling with glass to reflect sunlight so that it can burn logs out of the way. Most of the puzzles are fairly logically and I found that they don’t require many hints though three are available per level.

And showing some that it’s not a complete throwback, Axel & Pixel does have some modern elements such as quick-time events and some vehicle levels that break up the monotony. But most of the time, the puzzles are where the meat of the gameplay is.

Value: At 800 Microsoft points or $10, that’s a pretty steep price to pay for a game that doesn’t have a lot of replay value. Of course, there are some minigames patterned after some of the vehicle-based levels, and the campaign itself will last a few hours. But other than that, there isn’t much else. I’d only recommend this for the hardest of hard-core fans of point and click adventures

I posted video of Shadow Complex a couple of days ago, and now, here’s seven more minutes of the game. The last time we saw Jason Flemming , he had found a gun and was wandering through the underground structure. Now Chair’s Donald Mustard explains some of the stealth elements and even shows off a boss battle. Nice.